The Social Innovations Award 1995 from the Institute for Social Inventions
(London) as one of "the most imaginative, feasible and potentially transformative
schemes."

The "InteLnet" stands for "Intellectual Network," an interactive site
and virtual community devoted to the discussion and promotion of interdisciplinary
ideas in the humanities.

What makes the InteLnet special among many intellectual sites on the
Internet is its attempt to generate new ideas through electronic communication,
to realize new interactive possibilities of thinking opened with the Internet
as a whole. Not only does the word "InteLnet" sounds like "Internet," but
the former is an intellectual replica of the latter. The InteLnet is an
intellectual connection among those cyberspaces that can be connected electronically.

For me, the Internet is analogous to the human mind, with its infinite
conceptual links and associations. Now, retrospectively, I can interpret
our attempts at collective improvisations in Moscow (1982-89) as a search
for cyberspace within the more traditional space of a room and a roundtable.
The idea of the InteLnet, an electronic community of creative minds, though
in essence as old as the world, or at least as old as Plato's Academia,
comes from my experience in that late-Soviet intellectual milieu. Together
we tried to create integrated, "polyphonic" descriptions of certain cultural
phenomena and to work out patterns of "translation" for different professional
languages. Our improvisational community was a sort of pre-electronic InteLnet,
which can now develop in a technologically more mature, global form.

The Internet can digitally link everything to everything else: ideas,
disciplines, civilizations. Our capacity to understand and interpret these
potentially infinite links is, however, limited by the traditional division
of intellectual labor. For the time being the Internet, as a creation of
a technical mind, by far exceeds the conceptual capacities of a humanistic
mind. The InteLnet is an attempt to bring the humanistic "message" of the
Internet in line with its electronic "media," to elaborate the methodology
of thinking adequate to the multidimensionality and interconnectedness
of computer networks. The InteLnet is one response of the human intellect
to the Internet's challenge, a response of the creative mind to the challenge
of the expanding universe of electronic communications. To use a Hegelian
expression, the InteLnet evolves through the Internet as its self-awareness,
as the conscious manifestation of its own Idea.

The InteLnet sets five goals and accordingly supports five branches:

to advance new ideas that reconfigure the paradigms of humanistic knowledge
and transcend the borders of existing disciplines ("Bank of new ideas");

to investigate meaningful connections of concepts and ideas among the diversity
of disciplines ("Thinklinks");

to elaborate the methodology of a new humanistic metadiscipline responsive
to the demands and possibilities of an electronic environment ("InteLnetics");

to designate specific electronic sites for the crystallization of new humanistic
disciplines and areas of research ("InteLnet journals"); and

to create interactive textual bodies that might grow in time and involve
the collaboration of many minds ("Interactive Anthology of Alternative
Ideas").1

Branch 1. Bank of New Ideas

InteLnet can take on a role that neither a scholarly press nor an academic
institution is able to fulfill­as a channel for connecting society
with the work of its most powerful intellects. Any obstacles in this channel
can lead to both the intellectual impoverishment of society and the deterioration
of the social function of the intellect.

The traditional genre of the scholarly article or review, as it is established
in professional journals, does not satisfy contemporary needs in intellectual
communication. Articles frequently contain no new ideas whatsoever, or
else their ideas are dissolved in the flow of background information that
obscures the degree of actual novelty. The result is a kind of scientific
folklore, involving a migration of motifs without any creative productivity:
The means of synonymous expression in any language are unlimited. Many
ideas lack definite authors, and many authors lack definite ideas. It is
necessary to create a more flexible system of preservation and dissemination
of ideas, one that could reflect the uninterrupted process of producing
new knowledge, the continuity of cognitive activity itself.

One could justly point out that the evaluation of new ideas already
takes place within the academic forums, such as the dissertation defense,
but these activities can go on for years: the idea accrues "accountable"
supporting material, in which its original message and innovative impulse
are likely to drown. In addition, the most innovative ideas are usually
found on the borders between various fields, so that they have difficulty
"passing muster" with specialized scientific councils and committees and
are subsequently lost to that larger science for which they were intended.
A truly new idea seldom fits into ready-made spheres of knowledge; rather,
it wrenches itself away from the established set of dissertation topics
to create its own sphere.

The task of the InteLnet is to present new ideas in the most direct
and condensed form and to provide a public forum for their discussion.
This is the "interest" that authors gain from their deposits in the Bank
of New Ideas. It is not like a conference or a newsgroup where discussion
is led by small and usually inconsistent impulses of opinions, remarks,
rejoinders and objections. It is not like a professional journal treating
some particular problems in a highly specialized language. What is crucial
to the InteLnet is a specific genre of "a new idea," so pertinent to the
receptiveness and responsiveness of the electronic network.

Criteria

The humanities, as compared with natural and social sciences, remain
in a difficult situation as the very criteria for identifying and evaluating
new ideas are unclear, yet virtually never discussed. For these reasons
I will share the experience of the Bank of New Ideas, which was founded
under the auspices of the Image and Thought intedisciplinary association
in Moscow in 1986.2

The goal of this pre-electronic bank was to preserve and foster the
ideas that showed a significant degree of innovation and potential for
a productive impact on society. Discussion and registration of ideas was
conducted by experts of the Interdisciplinary Council, representing several
professions. A system of parameters was worked out for the evaluation of
ideas, including the following:

Unexpectedness­the capacity to amaze, to disrupt theoretical paradigms
and established patterns of thought.

Originality­innovativeness, the extent to which the idea differs from
others previously put forth in its field.

Verifiability­the extent to which the idea is convincing in the light
of available facts as well as its logical development from the foundations
it proposes.

Expressiveness and aesthetic properties of the idea­the inner harmony
of its components and levels of argumentation, the proportionality of deductive
and inductive elements, its plasticity and clarity, accessibility to intellectual
contemplation.

Breadth and scope­the volume of material embraced and interpreted by
the idea, the range of its repercussions and theoretical generalizations.

Productivity­the heuristic potential of the idea to influence intellectual
development in areas beyond its own basic material and disciplinary boundaries.

Realizability­the practical measure of the idea, as applied to its
specific contents and contexts; the possibility of its actualization on
various levels of social life.

Such are the principles employed by the Bank for the assessment of new
ideas. With further refinement they could serve as a basis for a more extensive
storehouse of interdisciplinary ideas and concepts.

Nothing unites one mind with another better than the flash of a new
idea. The effectiveness of the InteLnet should consist in rapid dissemination
of new ideas in the domain of public consciousness, without any introductions,
conclusions, equivocations­just the concentrated essence of innovation.
Some of the ideas may well prove fallacious, but the same rule should apply
in the sphere of cognition that applies in ethics. It is better to acquit
ten guilty people than to convict one innocent. It is better to voice ten
fallacious ideas than to silence a single true one. It is likely that there
are no fallacious ideas, just more and less productive ones.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What makes the InteLnet different from other Internet sites in the
humanities?

A. Its interdisciplinary orientation, which does not imply dilettantism
or disregard of intellectual rigor and responsibility, but accentuates
new ideas rather than professional erudition.

Q. How will the novelty of my idea be recognized?

A. Unlike the technical disciplines, there are no patents for new ideas
in the humanities. The Bank of New Ideas provides authors with the best
possible certificate: The date of your submission is automatically registered
and indicates your priority.

Q. Are there any restrictions on the number of submissions?

A. No. You are invited to deposit as many ideas as you can produce and
want to share.

Examples of unacceptable ideas: (a) "Writer X borrowed this motif from
writer Y, . . . " (b) "The results of this social poll show that . . .
"; (c). "The following mistakes can be found in the monograph of Z . .
. "

The most desirable ideas are constructive rather than critical and cross-disciplinary
rather than monodisciplinary.

Q. Can I deposit an idea that was already published in another form
(book, article, conference paper)?

A. Yes, you can, if this idea is presented in a capsule form and meets
the demands of originality and transdisciplinarity. However, it is recommended
that you use this unique space for ideas that have had no opportunity to
be publicized in a more traditional manner.

Q. Is there a copyright for the ideas submitted to the Bank?

A. The authors of new ideas retain the copyright for their submissions
(texts) and can use them as they find appropriate.

Q. Can I cite in my work passages from the materials collected in the
InteLnet?

A. Yes, you can. References to the source, its author and the InteLnet
are obligatory.

Guidelines for the Submission of New Ideas

You are invited to submit to the Bank your original ideas that cross
the boundaries of existing disciplines, or lay the foundation for a new
discipline, introduce a new paradigm into an existing discipline. Although
there are no legal forms for the patenting of nontechnological ideas, the
bank suggests the approximation of this procedure by recording the date
of submission. The submissions should be limited to two to four pages,
with possible links to more detailed sources. What is expected are unexpected
ideas capable of creating their own field of knowledge and becoming foundations
for new theories and/or practices. Such thinking can be called "paradigmatic"
since it does not add a new element to existing paradigms but instead creates
the paradigm itself.

Several suggested areas:

New cognitive concepts and research methods in the humanities

New disciplines and fields of scholarship

New artistic and literary movements

New models of social and professional behavior

New spiritual practices and movements

New methodological principles and metaphysical systems

Theory of everyday life

Alternative civilizations

Possible worlds

Immediately after the submission of your idea it is placed in the Bank
and becomes available for every Web user. See the Repository of new ideas
at: http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/bank_response.html

Branch 2: Thinklinks

This branch of the InteLnet is designed to establish intellectual links
among the distant and seemingly unrelated spheres of knowledge. Thinklinks
is a virtual metaspace where other cyberspaces (subjects, areas, disciplines)
can interact and penetrate each other.

For many centuries, human knowledge developed through increasing specialization.
This is, in particular, reflected in the hierarchical trees and subject
directories on the Web, such as Yahoo. The same Web, however, creates a
unique opportunity for remote fields to be instantly connected. Within
the existing patterns of specialization, a new tendency is at work: to
build interconnected, interlaced hierarchies of knowledge more reminiscent
of a forest than of separate trees.

A thinklink is a basic unit of interdisciplinary thought, an
attempt to connect within coherent logical discourse the concepts of various
professional domains. A thinklink is similar to a metaphor in that it unites
two heterogeneous images; a thinklink, however, is not a metaphor since
it establishes the internal, logical connection of two concepts or phenomena
rather their imaginative or associative resemblance.

Eventually, all these thinklinks could be incorporated into those subject
areas they mutually connect. The resources and directories on linguistics,
for example, will contain links to geology and gastronomy, astronautics
and silentology, not only specific languages, grammars, and dictionaries.
Thinklinks will constitute another dimension of the Web, making it intellectually
what it already is electronically­a web rather than rigid conceptual
grid. In this sense, InteLnet is Contra-Yahoo as it interweaves "rhizomatically"
distant categories and rubrics of knowledge rather than separating them.

Guidelines for the Submission of Thinklinks

You are invited to insert thinklinks­analytical connections among
various subject areas on the Web. Thinklinks are not just an intellectual
game or an exercise in creativity, but a new dimension of the Web, a metaspace
where other spaces (areas, disciplines) come into interaction.

Please connect two or more subject areas in a single logical discourse
or analytical essay. Size is limited to between 1 and 4 pages, or 300 and
1,200 words, with approximately 2 to 8 thinklinks interwoven in the text.
Areas must be connected essentially and analytically, not just through
personal preferences or idiosyncratic associations. (For example, statements
like "I like to read Nietzsche when flying in an airplane," or "Two things
I hate most of all are porridge and philosophy" do not constitute a thinklink
between aviation, philosophy, and gastronomy). See an example of a "linguistics
— gastronomy" thinklink: http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/tl_lingvo_gastro.html

Branch 3. InteLnetics: Perspectives on Integrative Knowledge

Verbal Epigraphs

In everything there is a part of everything.

­Anaxagoras

Everything exists only because of the argument between those who
agree

with each other and the love between those who argue.

­Giordano Bruno

Individuality contains infinity.

­Gottfried Leibniz

About each truth one can say something completely opposite to it
and it will be

equally true . . . Everything that is thought by a mind and said
in words is

one-sided. . . . But the world itself, everything existing around
us and within us,

never is one-sided.

­Hermann Hesse

Every thing can be described by means of any other thing.

­André Breton

Visual Epigraph

[An enormous pyramid built of smaller pyramids, which are built from
smaller pyramids, ad infinitum.]

This is not a whimsical artistic fantasy, but a fractal picture produced
by a computer on the basis of mathematical formulas discovered by an American
mathematician of Polish origin, Benoit Mandelbrot. A fractal is a fragmented
geometric shape that can be subdivided into parts, each of which is a reduced
copy of the whole. Fractals describe many real-world objects, such as clouds,
mountains, turbulence, and coastlines, that do not correspond to simple
geometric shapes.

Ideal objects, such as concepts, ideas, and minds, can also be described
as "fractals," in the sense that every idea potentially contains in itself
many other ideas. Philosophers of various epochs, in their attempt to achieve
universal knowledge, selected one, "primordial" aspect of the world and
deduced from it all existing phenomena. "Water," "fire," "idea," "spirit,"
"matter," "will," "life," "existence," and other principles served more
or less successfully to explain the totality of the world.

According to our epigraphs (both verbal and visual), the "world" as
a whole consists not of abstract principles, but of smaller "worlds." Each
world contains the previously mentioned principles, and all other possible
principles as well. InteLnetics attempts to explain the totality of the
world not from abstract particulars, but from their interaction within
concrete totalities. The pyramid consists of pyramids, not of lines and
points. Lines and points, as abstract units, or "principles," have their
role in the construction of cubes, rhombi, parallelepipeds, and other forms,
but they cannot explain what makes the pyramid the pyramid. The basic property
of the world is "worldness," the capacity to encompass and connect the
four basic elements and a number of other substances and properties in
one whole.

InteLnetics, as any project of "universal science," could be easily
challenged as still another utopian project, a kind of "perpetuum mobile."
It is the birth of cyberspace, the all-embracing electronic network, that
turns this abstract project into a feasible humanistic one.

A remarkable "coincidence": Cybernetics (now more routinely called "computer
science") and what I propose to call "inteLnetics," a humanistic metadiscipline,
have one spiritual father, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who elaborated the project of a universal
science capable of characterizing not only quantities but qualities. This
project of characteristica universalis historically split into "technical"
and "humanistic" parts, with the first part implemented in the World Wide
Web. Now it is time for the two aspects of the "universal characteristic"
to come together in a neo-Leibnizean synthesis. Cybernetics is here; it
is now the time for inteLnetics . . .

Branch 4. InteLnet Journals in the Humanities

http://old.russ.ru/antolog/INTELNET/zhur_gum.html

These electronic journals take a middle course between the highly specialized
professional journals that employ only academic discourse and intellectual
journals that are designed for a general educated audience and do not have
any thematic specialization or focus. InteLnet journals can be defined
as one-profile and multigenre publications that combine the
characteristics of academic and popular intellectual journals. They attempt
to cover those realms of thinking and inquiry that have not yet crystallized
into special disciplines and therefore need multiple levels of discourse
starting with unprofessional observations and documentation, private diaries,
and correspondence, and ending with genres of articles, critical reviews,
and other scholarly discourses. Several of these journals are devoted to
ordinary life and to the very concept of ordinariness. Below are statements
of purpose for the three journals.

In any useless occupation, one has to attempt to be divine. Or not
to engage in it.

­Paul Valery

Quiet Life

There are many journals devoted to the active forms of leisure: travel,
sport, gardening, cooking, etc. This journal is devoted to the purposeless,
useless, passive modes of spending leisure time. What do we do when we
do nothing? What are the minimal forms of human activity? And how do they
reflect personality and humanness? To stare out the window or loiter about
the street­is it possible to be a master and expert in these useless
activities; to develop the metaphysics of trifles, whims, pranks, tiny
occupations, or no occupations at all? This journal deals with the concept
of the ordinary because it has thus far attracted no attention from humanistic
theory. In the meantime, it is the ordinary and not the political, aesthetic,
technical, or mathematical that constitutes the larger part of human life.
But is there a theory of the ordinary­Triviology or Ordinarics­that
could compare in its weight and significance with mathematics, aesthetics,
political science? Epicurus taught us to live imperceptibly or inconspicuously.
But this does not mean that what is imperceptible to others should remain
imperceptible to ourselves. Each individual is the best theoretician of
his or her life. Nobody can replace him or her in the exploration of such
a precious and unique material, neither Plato nor Hegel nor Marx nor any
teacher of the humanities. This journal invites everyone to become a theoretician
of one's own life and of those singularities with which we intimately surround
ourselves. One person cannot live without soccer, another without a pipe,
the third without his collections of stamps. And no one can live without
the experience of breathing, walking, touching a cold windowpane or the
rough bark of the tree. What is the significance of these ordinary experiences,
and what do they add to our understanding of the nature of humanness?

Quiet life is the resource of our most tenacious unconscious memory,
which awakens under the impact of hypnosis, brain trauma, or the threat
of imminent death. In his book Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of
the Human Brain (1985), Wilder Penfield demonstrates that such spontaneous
flashes of memory, which happen on the threshold of death, invoke only
the most mundane images, such as peeling vegetables, washing dishes, or
watering the flowers in the evening. None of the patients he discusses
remembered anything connected with strong emotions, generalizations, complicated
professional tasks, or responsible decisions. What is remembered is the
uneventful background that surrounds our ordinary life without provoking
any noticeable response, that part of existence that escapes the consciousness
and, as Proust remarked, due to forgetfulness is preserved in its untouched
freshness.

It is true that the task of this journal is to introduce the quiet life
into the field of consciousness and therefore to remove at least a tiny
part of it from this storehouse of unconscious memories. But the imperceptible
life extends into infinity, and it is possible to recover only one drop
of it to lay the foundation for the micrology of the ordinary, for
the investigation of its smallest forms, noneventful facts, microbes, and
viruses of daily existence.

Genius

Practice random geniality!

In the context of this journal, genius is not a permanent quality of
special individuals but a certain state­mostly short-lived and transitory­that
is familiar to many people. In Roman mythology genius is a deity of the
momentary, the ephemeral. The journal publishes materials devoted to flashes
of genius in diverse spheres of science and art, in everyday life, personal
relationships, in love, in friendship, in leisure, in madness . . . The
journal's motto presupposes that geniality (like kindness) can overstep
all established boundaries (professional fields, ethical norms) and become
a spontaneous, improvisational way of living. One can be a genius of silence,
a genius of idleness; there may be geniuses of parenthood and housecleaning.
In a mediocre text there may be glimpses of genius. The journal explores
the nature of extreme capacities in the most ordinary conditions of their
manifestation.

Scientiae Desiderata (Desirable and Imaginable Sciences)

This journal is devoted to nonexistent disciplines that have a certain
epistemological potential and value, in particular, as bridges between
science, desire, and imagination. Many sciences, like aesthetics or genetics,
had individual creators and were first imagined on the basis of some preliminary
experience, experiment, or intuitive knowledge before they were elaborated
into separate disciplines. Though the nomenclature of institutionalized
research includes already thousands of established disciplines, the process
of their proliferation is unlimited and requires new investments of desire
and imagination.

In his famous classification of sciences, Francis Bacon placed under
the heading "Scientiae Desiderata" such disciplines as the theory of machines,
the history of arts and sciences, and others that developed centuries later
and now are firmly established. Almost all blank spots in Bacon's table
of sciences came to be filled in the course of time, like empty rubrics
in Mendeleev's periodic table of chemical elements did.

Scientific knowledge does not suppress human desires; on the contrary,
it is moved by the force of desires and in its advancement realizes them
more fully. In this sense Bacon's Scientiae Desiderata is probably the
first conscious synthesis of science and desire, the expression of such
deep and socially meaningful desires that determined the future of science.

On the eve of the twenty-first century, as the power of the imagination
more and more insistently intervenes into the structure of scientific knowledge,3
it is appropriate to concentrate our attention on the methodology of imaginable
sciences. It is advisable that the essays on imaginable sciences (and also
intellectual occupations and vocations) offered to this journal include
at least some of the following components: (1) methodological introduction,
rationale for the creation of a certain discipline, and perspectives of
its practical application; (2) position of this discipline in the networks
of knowledge and its relationship to other existing and imaginable sciences;
(3) elaboration of the conceptual system of the given discipline and definition
of its principal terms in their interconnection, including the possible
interpretations of these terms on behalf of various scientific schools
and trends within the discipline; (4) short illustrations of the definitions,
excerpts from the major works and papers­the texts can be as imaginative
as the discipline itself but they must demonstrate its categories and ideas
in action; (5) the general situation in this discipline­its main contradictions,
complexities, problems, challenges, perspectives, tendencies, debates,
and confrontations; and a (6) bibliography, including short annotations
and evaluations of the most fundamental and noticeable studies that can
prepare the rise of this discipline and make it practicable in the future.

The role of the imagination in sciences is not limited to the task of
their popularization but belongs to the very core of cognitive activity.
In addition to popular science (such as popular physics or biology)
and science fiction, which applies artistic fantasy to scientific
subjects, there is a place for what can be called imaginative science,
which elaborates those metaphoric and poetic potentials that are inherent
in conceptual thinking as such. Along with the classification of sciences
there is a need for an experimental branch of the philosophy of science
that would deal with the construction of sciences. In fact, it was the
father of modern experimental science, Francis Bacon, who initiated also
the constructive methodology of sciences. Accordingly, Bacon's famous aphorism,
"Knowledge is power," can be rephrased: "Imagination is the power of knowledge."
Albert Einstein, however, expressed this epochal shift even more resolutely:
"Imagination is more powerful than knowledge."

Northern Web: The Virtual Worlds of Russian Culture (WWW and
Traditions of Communal and Apocalyptic Spirituality)

Hyperauthorship: The Journal of Virtual and Trans-Biological Authorship

The fifth branch of the InteLnet is the most voluminous and will be
described in the next chapter.

Notes

1. There is also the sixth branch, "Collective Improvisations: Experiments
in the Communicative Generation of New Ideas." It was described in the
previous chapters. See the electronic site devoted to collective improvisations:
http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/impro_home.html
Branches one through three and six currently exist only in English,
branches four and five only in Russian.
2. On the history of this association and the pre-electronic forms
of the Bank of New Ideas, see the chapter "Collective Improvisations and
Transcultural Consciousness," the "History" part of this book, pp. 70-74.
3. The ground-breaking works in cognitive science by George Lakoff
and Mark Johnson, such as Metaphors We Live By: The Body in the Mind: The
Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason; Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, and others, helped enormously
to substantiate the connection between rationality and imagination.